Foreword to Get to the Bricks: The Experiences of Black Women from New Orleans Public Housing after Hurricane Katrina

This report is the culmination of a five-year research project exploring the experiences of women who lived in public housing when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005 and the levees protecting the city of New Orleans failed. It presents a comprehensive analysis of the interview responses of 184 low-income black women who were living in “The Big Four”—four large housing projects within the city of New Orleans, known as “the Bricks”—and who were displaced by the twin disasters of the hurricane and the flooding. The analysis is based on in-depth ethnographic interviews with the women conducted over a two-year period from 2008 to 2010, when many of them remained displaced in other cities while some had returned to find a different city than the one they had known.

The housing these women had been living in, and which had remained structurally sound during and after the storm, was demolished as part of an effort by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) to replace large public housing projects with mixed-income developments. City services were no longer conveniently concentrated near public housing, and public transit was much curtailed compared with before the storm. For those in other cities, obtaining information about what services and benefits were availabe to them and living in areas with only sparse public transportation were often confusing and disheartening and presented barriers to their ability to settle their children in schools and find employment. Some displaced women and their children found good opportunities in their new cities, but others longed to return to New Orleans. All of them experienced the breakup of their long standing family and community networks that had provided them with virutally uncountable forms of support—from child and elder care to sharing food and transportation and job leads.

The failure to coordinate services, to plan for the needs of a vulnerable population, to keep families and neighborhood networks together as much as possible, both during the evacuation and throughout their resettlement (which often required more than one move), and to find ways to enable all those who desired to return to New Orleans to do so constitute a third disaster, one like the failure of the levees of human origin.

Finally, during the period these families were struggling with the immediate aftermath of survival, displacement, and relocation, the United States was also experiencing the worst of the Great Recession with its long and slow recovery, the longest reession since the Great Depression in the 1930s, consituting yet a fourth disaster confronting these women and their families.

IWPR researchers, under the able leadership of Dr. Jane Henrici, former study director and now senior research fellow at IWPR, interviewed these women in their homes or other locations in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Houston. The Katrina disapora spread well beyond these relativley nearby cities to virtually every state in the nation. The Katrina migration will likely remain one of the largest and longest lasting in American history that stemmed originally from a natural disaster, compounded as it was by the disasters of human engineering. As such, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, as seen through these women’s eyes, have much to teach us about how we can improve public policy and disaster planning in the years to come.

In addition to Dr. Henrici and the many researchers who assisted her in this work, I would like to single out for thanks Prof. Kai Erikson of Yale University, who invited IWPR to join the Social Science Research Council’s Katrina project and to participate in its deliberations, as well as Josh Jarrett, Program Officer, and Hillary Pennington, Director of Education, Postsecondary Success & Special Initiatives, at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who generously provided the funding to conduct the interviews and analyze the results. Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeever, a former IWPR study director, also deserves special thanks for her early interviews in post-disaster New Orleans, which alerted us to the depth of the struggles these women were facing. For all of us at IWPR, this report is a fitting culmination to the research we began on the Monday after the hurricane hit, producing many fact sheets, briefing papers, book chapters, and short reports detailing, through both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the conditions faced by the women of New Orleans both before and after the storm. We wish for them and their families a secure and successful future. And it is our hope that their voices will have lasting impact on public policy.